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Thursday, August 23, 2012

Our baby girl is going to be 11 months old in 3 days. I can't believe we're about to hit 1 year. So much has happened in such a short amount of time. It's incredible how much things change every couple of weeks when you have a baby. Life is constantly adjusting. Right when something gets easier, something else is more difficult! But overall, everything is so wonderful and Ella has been such an amazing baby. And I hope very much that her demeanor and attitude remain the same throughout her toddler years as well!

As Ella embarks on her 1st birthday, the time also marks my 1st anniversary as a stay-at-home mommy. I still love being home with her and I can truly say that I enjoy life more overall now having the time to do things I've always wanted to do...

The biggest thing has been my experimentation with cooking and baking. We definitely eat much better now that I stay home and I love seeing new recipes turn out deliciously in my kitchen.

I would love to try my hands at some crafts as well, but haven't gotten to that quite yet. So I keep to my cooking, Ella, the house and helping Philip with some of his projects.

As we continue to evolve, I believe this blog should as well. "Ella Pearl" is about Ella of course, but I feel it also represents our new lives as a whole and how they continue to change in our activities, purpose, etc. While I don't want to make a grand statement of commitment to the blog and exactly how it will change and evolve over time, I do think it's time that it's allowed to become a creative outlet in conjunction with our musings and memories about its namesake.

My passions and ideas are slowly growing and they include things that consume my stay-at-home mom lifestyle...parenting, cooking, baking, decorating, parties, gifts, crafts, girly stuff, organization, etc. So new blog posts from me will be about those things along with my Ella updates for my own creative release and also hopefully helping or encouraging others who stumble upon this little blog.

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We took our first big trip with Ella in July for 3 weeks in Mexico. The first week was in Cancun for a nice beach resort vacation and the rest of the trip was spent in Mexico City visiting my family and exploring the city since Philip had never been.

Traveling with a 9 month old was not completely terrible and Ella was as good as she could have been. She loved getting to eat so many new foods (as she had just given up baby food before we left) and getting so much time strapped to Daddy on the Bjorn! She is now an expert swimmer as well with so much time spent in the pool.